We remember from school - we need to identify our shortcomings and work daily, hourly to eliminate them, not giving ourselves rest. Otherwise, we will not see luck. At the same time, you must admit that the psychological postulate that in order to change, you need to accept yourself sounds very paradoxical. Well, how then can we change, if all the bad habits, weaknesses, and what are there weaknesses - vices, are justified? Let's figure it out …
TWO PORTRAITS
Scientists have noticed an interesting phenomenon: people are pretty good at predicting the future of others. And very bad - your own. The reason is that a person does not know himself, incorrectly evaluates his motives and actions.
Nowadays there is a lot of talk about self-esteem - but how to evaluate what is unfamiliar to us? And the person eagerly listens to the assessments and opinions of others. It blooms with compliments, shrinks with angry criticism, secretly assuming the critics are right. After all, the bad, oddly enough, is believed faster and more firmly than the good.
There was such an experiment: two artists painted portraits of subjects. One of those sitting opposite embellished, and the other - almost caricatured emphasized the shortcomings. When the subjects were asked in which of the portraits they looked more like themselves, people sadly pointed to the "caricature." So the opinion about the overestimated self-esteem inherent in the majority is greatly exaggerated. The stranger seems to us not too pretty, and the mirror turns out to be crooked. And therefore, failures and defeats are quite natural. And the dislike of someone for us is understandable - it's hard to love a freak. Although out loud people tend to say positive things about themselves - however, you should be polite with strangers …
Philosophers and psychologists have understood the origins of self-rejection and self-loathing. True love is the love of a mother for her child. It is absolute love and absolute acceptance. If, of course, the mother is a true mother, in her best incarnation. A mother loves her child, in spite of whims and crying, sickness and pranks, regardless of whether the child is beautiful or not very good, healthy or sick, successful or not … The mother accepts the child as he is, and her love does not dry out if something goes wrong and the child does not live up to her expectations. In absolute love, there are no expectations - it is absolute acceptance. But the mother is not always capable of absolute love. Or father. One parent can manipulate love, punishing the child with rejection and deprivation of love for "bad deeds." For any imperfection, external or internal. And the child has a fusion of his “I” and his “actions”. “I did good - and I'm good. I have done a bad thing - I am bad and bad. " It is not an act or a mistake that is condemned, but the personality as a whole. An assessment is given not to the deed, but to his entire personality. The score is very low and unpleasant. And after the acceptance of the statement "I am bad" follows the punishment of oneself - the evil must be punished!
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FIRE ON A STEAMER
The steamer "Nicholas I", on which a nineteen-year-old student, the son of the despotic landowner Turgeneva Ivan, was sailing to Lubeck, caught fire and began to sink. Panic began, and a romantic young man, who, perhaps in his dreams, imagined himself a hero and a winner (this is typical of all young men), grabbed the sailor's sleeve. The last boat was lowered into the water, the ladies and children were rescued. And Turgenev shouted in panic to be rescued! He is the son of a rich mother, and she will pay handsomely! So I want to live, save me, let me into the boat!
Turgenev escaped, but all his life he was recalled unworthy behavior. Outwardly, Ivan Sergeevich achieved success, but he never started a family, died of a painful illness - maybe he felt he had no right to be happy. Although he did not do anything terrible: well, he fell into a panic, shouted, promised money … But his faith in himself collapsed, his timid self-love disappeared, a global disappointment occurred, which poisoned his life with a sense of guilt and his own imperfection.
And Augustine the Blessed wrote everything about pears stolen in childhood. Woefully scourging himself: he stole not out of hunger, but from "being overwhelmed by wealth", from satiety and, as they say, hooligan motives. Even the philosopher Rozanov became irritated many centuries later: they were given, they say, to the Blessed One! There are more terrible crimes and vices! But this is how a conscientious and kind person punishes himself: all his life, mercilessly and cruelly - for pears, for screaming in panic, for events of the distant past, exaggerating the significance of the act and the damage caused. Feeling disgust for what you have done, which turns into disgust for yourself.
IN JULY FORTY-FOURTH
“Accept yourself” is a paradoxical statement that seems false and profound. What can philosophers not come up with! Here I am! I reflect in the mirror, so familiar and understandable to pain. The only paradox is that in the mirror we are often not reflected, but the very caricature that seemed to the participants in the experiment to be their exact portrait.
Accepting yourself as you are is so difficult. Because first you need to understand who you are. What are you. See yourself in the mirror without a shard of the troll's mirror in the eye … And give up unnecessary enthusiasm about your own cause, which is no better than self-flagellation …
Oscar Wilde loved himself very much - he fed himself with exquisite dishes, gave him expensive wines, dressed him in fashionable and expensive clothes … But he secretly knew and remembered: when he was a child, dad did not call little Oscar by name. And in a simple word he called: "Nothing." And this "Nothing" nevertheless found a way to punish itself for worthlessness - they went to prison and lost everything. Wilde died in a cheap hotel, beggar and ugly - he could not accept himself. And without luxurious clothes and jewelry, without palaces and success in society, without enthusiastic praise, he became just "nothing." And he chose to die.
It is sometimes impossible to understand and accept oneself without the participation of an “emotionally significant other”. The one who draws our portrait correctly. Better yet, take a picture. When there is no other, we resort to introspection - introspection. We keep a diary, write posts on social networks, delve into ourselves and analyze our actions and motives. This often ends in self-punishment. Emotionally significant can be someone who loves us unconditionally. Or it certainly accepts. With all our “wildness and quietness,” as Tsvetaeva wrote. Calmly and benevolently, helping to fix something, but to understand something. Not in ourselves - the personality does not lend itself to "alteration", but in our behavior, in our actions. A wise psychologist, a benevolent psychotherapist, a humanist-philosopher - this is the “significant other” who can help us in difficult times of doubt or despair.
“The tragedy of Tsvetaeva is that she never understood herself,” one biographer said. She understood and accepted her poetry, but could not understand who she was and what she was. The romantic lyric heroine of the poems was strikingly different from the gray-haired unfortunate woman tortured by life. Or - tortured by herself. Tsvetaeva's son, Georgy, made many mistakes: he stole things from an elderly woman, from whom he lived in evacuation. He took off his watch. He did not always behave correctly. He himself suffered and suffered from the consequences of his actions - he was a very young and talented young man. And then he went to the front and died in July 1944, like many of his peers. And the tragic diaries remained. And there was a line from a poem that was never finished: "The most difficult thing in the world is to endure and forgive yourself."So there is a sure way to understand and accept yourself - external circumstances, when not to self-abasement and not to self-conceit. When everyone is worth exactly what they are worth. And do not punish yourself all your life for pears or momentary weakness - the main tests are yet to come. And the events of life are training and rehearsal, which help us to correct flaws and overcome vices, so that later we can say: “Now I know who I am. And I can accept and forgive myself. "And I can accept and forgive myself. "And I can accept and forgive myself."
Anna Kiryanova, psychologist-philosopher, writer.